About Real And Not-So-Real Princesses
Rohini Mokashi-Punekar
TWICE UPON A TIME by Payal Kapadia Puffin Books, 2019, 185 pp., 1999
August 2019, volume 43, No 8

There is no getting away from it: the title Twice Upon a Time must be one of the best things that happened to children’s literature in a long time. Together with the inspired illustrations, funny and fecund, the title promises a romp that evoked, in this reviewer, dusty memories of settling down with a book in a quiet corner of the summer vacation, and surrendering to the bliss of being swept away.

Payal Kapadia is the winner of the 2013 Crossword Book Award for Children’s Writing and the illustrator Sandhya Prabhat has received considerable praise as well, and therefore it was with happy anticipation that I sat down to read this little book. The prologue augured well. Describing the first tantrum thrown by Princess Keya in the pink, palatial bathroom of Surya Mahal on the day she entered her teens, the writing is crisp, sharply visual and subversive. ‘King Ferrlip felt faint, and he reached for his jar of smelling salts’ is pretty priceless, as are the descriptions of the royal paratrooper sliding down the rope to the bathroom window, the royal lock-picker sticking a pin into the heart-shaped keyhole or the royal window-boy curling his toes around the rung of the ladder he is climbing up in reaction to the princess’s ear-splitting scream.

When the story starts to tell us of the execution of Keya’s plan to quit being a princess, up to her gills as she is with an acute ennui of the pink sameness of it all, Kapadia’s narrative loses some of its tang and fire. If the entry of Nyla, the prospective substitute princess, is meant to bring in the ordinary as a foil to the luxuries of the palace, and her reactions to the way things are done in the Mahal to function as a reality check, this strategy does not really work well. Even though her desire to get away from her brothers and her ambition to become a princess is nicely positioned, Nyla with her brown face and the cut-off jeans playing dragons with the brothers in her poor home is an outlandish creature: she does not fit within the geographical or cultural moorings of the Indian poor even if it is granted that this is not a homogenous population. Kapadia’s intention to be subversive soon morphs into a need to be politically correct. The queen doggedly knitting away her fiftieth sweater in order to qualify for the award that queens are conferred in this fantasy land, begins to play hooky. While her cravings for bubble-gum and bicycle rides are fairly funny, the reader has by now gauged the author’s feminist agenda, seen all too clearly in finale of the hungry vegetarian dragon, the timid cake-loving princes and the two brave princesses: real and substitute.

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